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DCP projection (trailers vs features)


Benjamin Lamb

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Was really surprised to hear it was as many as 10-15 these days but it may be growing with the push for 4K TV's.

Sony has a website here which seems to suggest that 2013 was a landmark year with 20 releases! It seems to have fallen quite a bit in 2014 tho.

 

http://www.sony.co.uk/pro/products/digital-cinema-4k-movie-releases

 

There are two big issues with 4K in cinemas. One is that a lot of the movies tend to be heavy on the visual effects which will probably be finished in 2K but the other issue is that most cinemas are only capable of 2K video projection.

 

I think there has been a big difference between the ads and the actual feature for a long time.

It could be that the adverts are still being projected in standard definition.

 

Freya

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From experience with my own films...

 

The trailers are graded and finished in a hurry, outside my own control, and they look lousy:(

 

There is also the issue of the trailers being scaled for films showing in a different aspect ratio and that can degrade the image as well.

 

And I have, in the past, seen some trailers screened on an inferior projector used for ads and trivia, but not recently...

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I think it really is an issue of trailers being 1080p and resized to 2K as David mentioned. Certainly there are problems with the timing of trailers, ect. but the easy way to judge is just by looking at the green band at the beginning of the trailer; just looking at the text, if you are close up toward the screen, you can see a serious difference in the pixel quality of the trailers and the features. The trailers look like they are on a high quality laptop.

 

But I'm still surprised that most films are projected at 2K. I really didn't know that. Is there a huge difference between a 2K and 4K DCP?

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The difference is 4X the data to put it bluntly. It's not so much the cost of the final DCP but doing a 4K post including visual efx, and the costs are even higher if you are talking about a 3D movie. For a 2D, non-efx movie, the jump in cost for finishing in 4K isn't so bad but it exists, which is enough for some producers to not want to spend the extra money. Hopefully they won't have much choice soon in the matter because some of their markets will demand a 4K version.

 

Many theaters have 4K projection (mainly those who bought Sony projectors) but they are mostly showing 2K DCP's on them.

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The difference between 1080p and 2K is not that big however. It's something like about 5% if I remember right.

It may be that you are seeing work that is just graded to a lower quality as suggested earlier or it could even be that the trailers aren't coming off the DCP server but are on the setup being used for the adverts which may be of a lower quality depending on what they are using for that these days.

 

Freya

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Many theaters have 4K projection (mainly those who bought Sony projectors) but they are mostly showing 2K DCP's on them.

 

David is right.

I understand that sometimes even if they have a 4K projector the DCP server isn't up to hosting 4K.

 

Also when you do have a server that is capable of 4K then the bandwidth isn't increased at all, so the 4K just becomes more compressed to fit into the same size file as a 2K DCP would use. I've heard there is going to be a new DCP standard that is going to fix a lot of issued but it's not even been announced yet.

 

David is also right about the VFX issue. If you check out the Sony link I posted you will see that most of the 4K releases are the larger releases that aren't VFX heavy. 4K UHD TV might drive 4K releases although it's still up in the air as to whether 4K TV will take off to that extent.

 

Freya

 

Freya

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And the worst part is, theaters which don't have 4k projectors, aren't going to be spending money again to buy them when MOST movies come in 2k anyway.

 

David is right about trailers being done in 1080 and upres'd to 2k. I use to work for a trailer house and that's what we did. Sometimes we didn't even color them, they would come pre-colored off the HDCAM tapes. Other times, we'd send our EDL's and files to a shop for color, it all depended on the budget.

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And the worst part is, theaters which don't have 4k projectors, aren't going to be spending money again to buy them when MOST movies come in 2k anyway.

 

David is right about trailers being done in 1080 and upres'd to 2k. I use to work for a trailer house and that's what we did. Sometimes we didn't even color them, they would come pre-colored off the HDCAM tapes. Other times, we'd send our EDL's and files to a shop for color, it all depended on the budget.

 

Well theres another possible factor as the HDCam tapes aren't even full 1080 as we know it but anamorphic at 1440x1080 with color subsampling of 3:1:1 and 8bit.

 

Freya

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